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Archive for July, 2023

Meadow

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on July 24, 2023| 18 Comments »

 
Walking through tall grass
on a narrow path, my fingers
spread wide to pull through the seedheads.
As if to touch is to be touched.
As if, with open palms,
I could pull this beauty
inside me and carry it with me
until I give it to you—
as if I could somehow
slip a whole meadow into your pocket
so you could unfold it anytime
and wander through grass
as high as your chest
and feel how the vastness
reminds us who we are.

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Above Treeline

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on July 23, 2023| 4 Comments »

 
 
Everywhere I turn,
the measureless sky,
wild open sky,
deep bluing,
unencumbered sky,
and how is it
it enters me
and fills my lungs
with vastness,
steeps my mind
in spaciousness,
slips immensity
into my cells,
and I, who
have been stone,
who thought I knew
something of
what a life is,
I feel myself dissolve
into blue
as if it’s the only
thing I could do.
When I leave,
the blue comes
with me.

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One Instruction

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on July 22, 2023| 4 Comments »

not here to teach me
but to bring beauty
this red nasturtium

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Because

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged on July 21, 2023| 4 Comments »


 
Because it is Thursday,
I miss you, which is to say
because I am alive, I miss you.
I miss you rolling in the grass,
your laughter rising like sunlight.
I miss your enormous shoes
piled beside the front door.
I miss how you wanted
and wanted and wanted.
I miss the knives of your words
when you were unhappy
and the cloud of your dissatisfaction,
the blushing dusk of your joy.
Tonight I crawl inside the missing
and sprawl there
like a woman washed up on shore,
spent, shocked, traumatized
and grateful, astonished
to still be alive.

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After a Difficult Day

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on July 19, 2023| 8 Comments »


 
 
I go to the garden
and snip the dead blooms
and talk to the beans
and stake the tall stalks
of blue delphiniums.
I plunge my hands
in the dirt to pull weeds
and pull spinach into my mouth.
In an hour, I am wholly new.
But to remember who I am,
five minutes will do.

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One Eavesdropping

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on July 18, 2023| 4 Comments »

 
silence has a secret
the whole night
leans in to listen

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Returning to Stillness

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on July 17, 2023| 16 Comments »


 
I can’t unnotice this fist
that has grabbed my chest
and squeezes it hard, this prickly balloon
that seems to have blown itself up
in my belly. To be still today
is to notice that so much inside me
is writhing, squirming, thrashing.
Hello discomfort. Hello agitation.
Hello wishing that stillness
could be more still.
Eyes closed, I watch myself
as I sit in the middle of the empty room,
sunlight stretching across the floor
in bright and angled shapes.
I zoom out and see the whole house.
Zoom out farther and see the yard, the trees.
Zoom out until I see our small town,
then a blur of green and brown,
then the familiar blue and green curve of the earth.
As it spins and orbits, the earth is anything but still,
and yet such spaciousness surrounds it.
Oh, sweet woman sitting still in your room
with your hand on your heart
and a world of thrust and upheaval
spinning inside you,
right now, it’s like this.
You’re being moved. You’re still.
It’s like this.

*

Um, yeah … so if you read yesterday’s poem, I have to laugh… yesterday being still felt so easy, so simple, so open, so, well yummy. And then today??? Oh friends. This is one of the great gifts of poetry–every day the chance to notice what is here. And every day, the same thing feels so new. 

On my daily program “The Poetic Path,” I use the tag “Seeing the same world in a new way … with poems.” If you haven’t checked out this other daily offering, perhaps consider it. It’s an app for your phone, found on the Ritual Wellbeing app. Unlike the daily poems, i curate them … and it’s a chance to hear the poems aloud. I always talk a little about where they came from and how they were written, then read the poem again, and then offer an optional writing/thinking prompt for you. There is a monthly or annual fee for Ritual–and there are MANY other programs available on it. You can try it out for free. If you’re interested, from your phone visit HERE. 

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On a Day When Stillness Seems Possible

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on July 16, 2023| 6 Comments »


 
 
and the river is a long white stroke
of roiling and continuous surge,
and the grass, gone to seed,
wavers in the wind, then stills,
wavers, then stills, and the swallows
spiral, the leaf shadows spangle
and the ants braid a path
across the stones.
But I rhyme today with the cottonwood trunks,
my own body unmoving in the breeze.
It feels good in this moment
to be more tree than cloud,
more silence than song.
So easily, the stillness opens me,
softens me. How simple, really,
to do nothing. How is it I so often resist?
If there is no in me now, I do not notice it.
Stillness has made a home in me
and there seems to be nothing
the stillness refuses. Come,
it seems to say. There is room here
for everything. It opens me wider.
The world rushes in.

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Almost Two Years After Your Death

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on July 15, 2023| 12 Comments »


 
 
I no longer pick up the phone to call you.
No longer expect you to walk in the room.
Eventually, the brain learns to expect
the absence, the ears learn to expect
the silence, the body grows accustomed
to the loss of your body and recalibrates
itself in space. But the heart, broken open,
is as full as it ever was.
Did I think it would be parched?
Now I know love as a wellspring,
a continual supply.
Never once has the heart felt empty.
There, every time I look, I find you.

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On the Night Before My Daughter Turns Fifteen, I Spend Hours Looking at Old Photos

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on July 15, 2023| 15 Comments »


 
 
And there you are, eating marshmallows
off the gingerbread house
and sledding down the hill to the pond.
You’re in a frothy pink tutu.
You’re covered in mud.
You’re wearing my hot red dress.
You’re Monsieur Lafayette. You’re a ninja.
A pirate. Chinese take-out. A unicorn.
You’re swimming. You’re swinging.
You’re curled up, asleep in my bed.
So many of these moments
I know you don’t remember,
but I do, and I marvel now
how every moment of your life
has made you into you.
There are moments I would snapshot if I could,
the back of your head as you snuggle into me
on the couch in the morning,
the curl of your fingers
as they reach toward my hand,
the sweet lump of you under the covers
before I try to wake you,
the joy in you that slips beyond the frame.

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